'Hobo' a Month Older Than Thought

I've learned a second new word this weekend: antedater.

The main playing field for competitive antedaters is the e-mail list of the American Dialect Society (americandialect.org): that's where researchers post their new finds for the record (which also serve as challenges for others to beat). Antedaters take especial delight in finding uses earlier than those shown in the OED (and in knowing their work will be picked up on by Oxford editors). Since August, the list has seen the antedating of "hydrant" pushed back to 1801 from 1828, "hobo" to September 1888 (from only a month later), and "jamboree" (meaning "a large party") to 1858, back from 1861. [Link]

This would seem a perfect sideline for genealogists. Keep an eye out for hoboes while prowling through old newspapers in search of ancestors.

Genealogy: It's Not For the Living

It was the title of Henry H. Crapo's 1912 family history—Certain Comeoverers—that first caught my eye. "Comeoverers," as it turns out, was what Henry called his immigrant ancestors. The word hasn't yet caught on, for reasons that escape me.

What kept my interest was the prefatory note Henry wrote to his nephew, William W. Crapo, explaining why he had spent time cataloging dead people, and why William shouldn't become a genealogist himself. If only I had read this advice when I was a boy.

Here's how Henry begins (emphasis mine):

My dear William:

At the present lustrum of your life you are, and should be, supremely indifferent to your ancestors. They are dead and gone and that's an end on't. Your utmost powers of receptivity are properly absorbed by vital considerations. "Dead uns are nit"—as you would put it. In presenting you the following notes I ask not that you consciously attempt to change your present attitude. Inevitably there will come a time when these records of your forebears will have for you at least a passing interest. To you at that time I dedicate them. I hope, indeed, the time will never come when the pulse of glorious life will beat so slowly that you can afford to devote it to genealogical study. A lonely and a sterile life alone can find sufficient satisfaction in the dry-as-dust occupation of delving into dreary records to find a name, a mere name, the date when the name was born and died, the date when the name married another name, and the dates of all the other names that went before and came after.

Hoping to save you from so deplorable an expenditure of vitality, I, not inappropriately, present to you the names of many of the men and women who are responsible for your existence.

Genealogisms

The prospect that Wikipedia will delete its entry for Censuswhacking because it is a neologism has prompted me to think up some other genealogical neologisms—call them "genealogisms," and let that be the first—which, with any luck, will be banned as well someday.

• Charlemagnia - A condition suffered by those who expect all their ancestral lines to end in royalty.
• Deshamification - Destroying or concealing evidence of an ancestor's disgraceful behavior, such as membership in the Hitler Youth, participation in "midget tossing," or voting for Warren G. Harding.
• Fumblineage - One's descent from a series of ancestors, each of whom was conceived on his parents' wedding night.
  
• Haleytosis - An unfortunate reliance on oral tradition when compiling one's family history.
  
• Incestors - Married ancestors so closely related that their union would now be illegal.
• Kleptonamiac - One who steals names from another's genealogy database to add to his own.
• Nepotaph - A memorial inscription carved into the gravestone of another, more prominent member of the family.
  
• Polygameetup - A reunion for certain families in Utah.
• Pyroblamia - The propensity of town and county clerks to blame the lack of records related to one's ancestors on a mythical conflagration.
• Thanatopology - The study and mapping of burial places. Most often practiced by genealogists and serial killers.

A Dedicated Hakamaira

From the Japan Times of June 19, 2005:

Tomb raver

By SETSUKO KAMIYA
Staff writer

Teenage years are often a time of confusion. But for one 37-year-old who goes by the pen name Kajipon Maruko Zangetsu, it was a time of torment due to family problems and a majorly broken heart.

To escape his painful reality, Kajipon sought refuge in the world of literature and art. He read and read, from Osamu Dazai to Goethe, and absorbed himself in the music of Beethoven and Mozart.

[snip]

At age 19, by which time he was an out-and-out arts junkie, Kajipon flew to Leningrad in the U.S.S.R. (now St. Petersburg in Russia) to visit the grave of the writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski, whose "Crime and Punishment" had inspired him. "I wanted to thank him in person for saving my soul," Kajipon said.

But Dostoevski literally changed his life.

"As I stood before his grave, his writings became so vibrant. It felt as if he was talking to me," Kajipon recalled. "Until then, he was just a name, but his existence in this world suddenly felt so real."

Shocked but delighted by this realization, Kajipon then hit on an idea that has steered his life ever since. "If this happened with Dostoevski," he explained, "I thought that the same thing must occur with Soseki and Shakespeare. There was no way that I wouldn't visit them, too."

So it was that Kajipon became a pilgrim -- or what he calls a "hakamaira," a word he invented by combining the Japanese word hakamairi (grave visit) with the sound of the English suffix "er" to signify someone who visits graves.

And certainly he's nothing if not a devoted hakamaira, as, since that first pilgrimage in 1987, he has visited the graves of 600 "heroes and heroines" in 40 different countries.

[snip]

[H]e makes it a strict rule not to visit the grave of anyone whose works he is not familiar with -- or hasn't been impressed by. "This isn't sightseeing; that would be very rude," he insists.

[snip]

[Read the whole story]